Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Cultural slapstick with students
Student, via email: Could you please approve these study-abroad courses for my degree? (We have a process for this that I expect students to use; direct email is not the way to go.) Me: Who sent you my way to approve these? They: I’m so sorry, I didn’t intend to bother you. I will find…
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Glucose on the web service
As a professor, I’m apparently increasingly communicating not with students, but with bots representing students. The following communication ensued after I failed a student for my research class, because they hadn’t submitted any of the required homework. Student: “I have submitted all the method exercises on time, but my final grade is fail.” Me: “There…
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Why would anyone complain about penalizing research papers that have fake citations?
Arxiv, the popular preprint server, recently decided to penalize submitters of articles that contain non-existing references, presumably hallucinated by an AI. All authors will be sent to the doghouse, not just the first author. They’ll be blocked for a year from submitting new articles and will have their whole history reviewed, among other sanctions. While…
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Making final theses more agile
Over fifty years ago, Peter Naur stated that computing is a human learning activity. (I’m paraphrasing.) An example of this insight is that you may start a project with one set of requirements and that you may end the project (or timebox or release) with another (probably related) set of requirements. Requirements happen at the…
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Research vs. engineering
As annoying and repulsive as the world’s richest man’s behavior often is, he is a great source of social media entertainment. He recently complained that making a difference between researchers and engineers is a false dichotomy and hence xAI would do away with such a distinction. Obviously, it is xAI’s decision on how to label…
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Strategic issues when hiring professors
I have always wondered what makes a good hiring strategy for professors at a computer science department. Here are my thoughts on two dimensions: Core strength or best you can get? A common strategy is to double down on your strengths and hire more of the same. For example, at my engineering faculty, there are…